Friday, March 6, 2009

"Illusions die hard. Especially the ideological kind. When the illusion of Barack Obama, the peacemaker, is finally dispelled, we are going to wake up and find ourselves waist-deep in a war that will soon threaten to dwarf the disastrous invasion of Iraq, both in human and material cost.

We know this from what he has said he will do, and what he has already done. He's already announced he's sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to nearly 40,000. Not that this comes as any surprise: his entire critique of the Bushian foreign policy during the campaign was that we've been fighting the wrong war: that we had to get out of Iraq so we could occupy and pacify Afghanistan, and make a proper job of it. He advocated going into Pakistan, and outflanked the Republicans on the right.....

This sort of imperialism is a perfect fit for the new age we are living in: Obama's war will be fought in the name of moral and material uplift, whilst taking hundreds of thousands of unemployed out of the labor market....."